Dorsal Debate (July/August 1995 | Volume: 46, Issue: 4)

Dorsal Debate

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Authors: Harold Holzer

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July/August 1995 | Volume 46, Issue 4

The debate over the so-called earliest daguerreotype of Lincoln has moved south —anatomically speaking, that is. Having spent months comparing the face in the controversial photograph with faces in dozens of known Lincoln images—using computer overlays and state-of-the-art video “morphing” techniques to reveal similarities and differences—both advocates and detractors have now taken matters in hand: the right hand, to be precise.

The idea for the new approach was generated by Dr. Ralph B. (“Monty”) Leonard, an associate professor of emergency medicine at the Bowman Gray School of Medicine at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem. In a telephone call to this writer after first reading about the photo in American Heritage , Dr. Leonard wondered whether the daguerreotype’s owner had ever subjected its subject’s vividly delineated right hand to a “dorsal vein comparison” with Lincoln’s own right hand. “These patterns never change with age,” Dr. Leonard maintained, adding that he had begun experimenting with such tests at Bowman Gray to help identify John Does.

Leonard went on to purchase a plaster cast of Lincoln’s right hand from the Mazzolini Artcraft Company of Cleveland and then carefully traced the venous pattern it revealed. His conclusion: The back of Lincoln’s right hand had H-shaped veins; Hoffman’s daguerreotype showed a man with X-shaped veins. “That was enough for me,” he said. “This was anatomical evidence that it’s not Lincoln. I’m sorry to say that. I’d love to have proven that it was Lincoln. But vein patterns are set down in the embryonic stage, and while weight fluctuations and other variables may change their density, they don’t change the way they’re structured.”

Not so fast, replied the picture’s owner, Robert Huffman, who has traced his daguerreotype back to the descendants of Lincoln’s assistant private secretary, John Hay. “Based on the procedures the doctor used,” he argued during a recent visit to New York, “I’d be more upset if the test indicated that it was Lincoln.” For one thing, Huffman charged, Dr. Leonard had relied for his comparison on a modern commercial reproduction plaster cast many generations removed from the original made from life in Springfield, Illinois, by Leonard Wells Volk in May 1860. Besides, he pointed out, Lincoln’s right hand was unnaturally puffy the day the cast was made, badly swollen from shaking the hands of hundreds of well-wishers after winning the presidential nomination three days earlier. Dr. Leonard replies that he also studied a photograph of an older Volk cast from the Smithsonian and reiterates his belief that mere swelling does not shift vein patterns.

Not content merely to rebut an unfavorable scientific test, Huffman and Joseph Buberger, the photographical dealer who has led the campaign to authenticate the portrait, proceeded to trot out their own experts to counter Dr. Leonard’s theory. Grant Romer, the historian at the George Eastman House in Rochester who was not prepared to positively authenticate the Hoffman daguerreotype